With the likely killing of Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin reasserted his power, but Russian history offers lessons on violence
But as usual in today’s Russia, we know very little about what is really happening within the tiny inner circle of the Putin court. It is clear that so far even supposed"security experts" are just reading the same Telegram accounts as the rest of us. We have not seen Prigozhin’s body and his death cannot be confirmed but both the Russian state and Wagner sources say he is dead—so he most probably is no longer amongst the living.
Yet it turned out Putin was inept at running his own court and could not prevent Kremlin rivalries playing out online and then exploding into open rebellion on 23 June 2023 when Prigozhin led his forces to seize Rostov and then advance on Moscow. We may never know the real deal brokered by Putin’s client Belarusian dictatorto stop the advance, but Putin, ashen and lacking his trademark swagger, was forced to go on TV to denounce Prigozhin’s treason.
President Putin himself revelled in that culture—his swaggering threat to liquidate Chechen terrorists “even sitting on the lav” was a deliberate statement of that murderous machismo.
The violence that Prigozhin flaunted was very much a part of Putinist culture as it was in Stalin’s time: Putin has never approached the scale of repression that Stalin unleashed during collectivisation, his famines and then his Terror. The death toll runs into untold millions—it will never be exactly known. It is a different time now and Putin is not Stalin in many ways.
Even more personal was the betrayal of Peter by his own eldest son who plotted against him and then defected, escaping to Vienna in 1716. Peter lured him back promising security—but on his return he tortured him to death. Peter is Putin’s hero. Photographs of his sumptuous yacht were revealed by opposition researchers online and even there he had a statuette of the first emperor of Russia. No matter how close the traitor, the traitor had to die.
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